I stumbled across a database of German National Library of Science and Technology i.e. TIB. When I explored it, I found it to be one of the most comprehensive databases we have ever used. Here are some of its highlights –
- It is the biggest science and technology database in the world with collection of over 9 million items which include various scientific literature, books, research projects, German search reports, audio-visual content, etc.
- Provides access to gray literature, which is difficult to obtain and not available via the standard book or journal trade. To know more about gray literature check link.
- Provides the provision to access difficult-to-obtain publications from Eastern Europe and East Asia that are linguistically hard to access. This includes the coverage of the databases like China Academic Journals, CiNii, Germany-China Standards Information Portal and some top
- Holds a large number of standards, norms, patents, source data, scientific conference proceedings, government research papers and dissertations
- Collection of Audio-Visual media (one of its unique feature which I like the most), it has a TIB AV’s portal which provide you the access to recordings of conference presentations, experiments, conferences, colloquia, panel discussions, scientific lectures, talks, presentation of 3D models, microscopic images, models, prototypes, never-ending things which we require to explore some concept/product in more depth. This is not all, it provides the provision to search all these information through keywords or through different filters.
- Holds a repository of 46000 journals, largest in any online database.
Nikhil Gupta
Manager, Patent Search Team – GreyB